Hamas War

Monday, July 21, 2008

So, It's Not Just My Imagination

During my recent trip to New York I found it more and more difficult to discover any important news about Israel. All the media hyped was celebrity divorce and marital problems. And a murder here and there.

This Friday's Jerusalem Post obituary about the late journalist Eric Silver mentioned that nowadays there aren't many foreign journalists any more. Until a few years ago, all of the major foreign newspapers had their "man in Jerusalem."

The New York Times just wrote about it, too. Money is put in local news, not foreign.

That's because people don't buy the paper to find out what's happening far away. They're more interested in reading about themselves.

5 comments:

Hadassa DeYoung said...

Shalom!
It could be also that that newspapers/TV stations prefer to save money by having local journalists instantly email them all the pictures, videos and text that they need. But I do remember that the bulldozing terrorist in Jerusalem was filmed by a variety of foreign journalists. HonestReporting does a fair amount of work hosting foreign journalists and trying to convince them that the BBC and Al-Jezeera are biased. Before we make any conclusions, we really should take into consideration the role technology plays in the size and location of new crews.
Hadassa

Batya said...

Hadassa, I was in the states during that terror attack and it was barely covered. Only those who get their news form Israeli internet sources were aware of it.

A couple of years ago, I wanted to check out more details of a news piece I had read and googling only brought me more of the identical text from one of the big news services.

susankellogg said...

Think it's not right to concentarte on lcal news only. May they really want to save having only local journalists. But everything happening in the world should be known as somehow or other it concerns everyone.

Hadassa DeYoung said...

Shalom!
Batya, that's interesting about the terrorist attack, - and sad. I guess what I saw from foreign news crews on the Internet never made it into the mainstream media - and never does. How pathetic.
Hadassa

Batya said...

susan, don't forget that newspapers are businesses, and most readers would rather read gossip about movie stars than Arab terror attacks and kassams on Sderot.

hadassa, I understand that the attack got a couple of minutes, including commercial breaks. As I just wrote, it's business.